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ICAT

ICAT is an open source meta-data management system designed for large facilities. ICAT development is a collaboration involving ISIS, the Scientific Computing Department of STFC, ILL and the Diamond Light Source. PaNdata WP4 is aiming to provide use cases and requirements for the ICAT development to produce a product which meets the functionality of the proposed virtual labs. Important tasks of PaNdata WP4 include the deployment of ICAT and service verification; this work is progressing well. Currently, ICAT is in production at ILL, ISIS and DLS and several labs (e.g. ALBA, DESY, ELETTRA and ESRF) have deployed ICAT prototype instances, which have been tested during service verification.

An important consideration in a meta-data catalogue is the meta-data schema. To satisfy PaNdata's needs, a number of modifications have been proposed and implemented in ICAT. The schema is closely related to the standardized meta-data schema implemented in NeXus. NeXus provides a complete description of the experimental conditions during an experiment, and covers essentially all of the data required for meaningful searches in a meta-data catalogue. Ingestion of NeXus into ICAT is straightforward; the ICATs in production at ILL, ISIS and Diamond ingest thousands of NeXus files every day.

ICAT has many attractive features, such as the programmable web service interface, the integration of provenance information and the registration of Data Object Identifiers. The developments at the moment include the ICAT Data Service (IDS) and a rich collection of authentication mechanisms.

Deployment status

Currently, nine of the participating facilities operate an ICAT instance. A quick overview can be found on the latest ICAT service verification. Currently, ICAT is in production at ISIS, ILL and DLS (at some sites not involved in PaNData ODI). An instance at DESY will be in production in Fall 2013. Prototype instances of ICAT are operational at ELETTRA, ESRF, HZB, JCNS and SOLEIL. STFC e-science in addition operates a number of virtual ICAT instances to demonstrate the federation of ICATs via TopCat and the federated search across catalogues.

ICATs in production

Currently, four sites run an ICAT in production to archive and manage all experimental data generated on site:

Schedule of service verification

The schedule for the service verification is in the following table. A later draft of this plan will contain further refinement of the contents of the service verification. Each service verification has detailed instructions and the report and can be found below.

Schedule of service verification (SV)

SV

Date

Major topics

4

10 May

Use of the bigv federation to verify the download manager.
Use of the bigv authentication service.

5

21 June

Initial test of the development federation.
Verification of an download service.
Verification of an ingest service.

6

October

Initial test of the production service.
Integration of materials from WP 5, 6, 7, 8.

Note: These releases will not be packaged as a single package. The release will be a stack of components from a variety of sources. We will provide information in the service verification report of the versions and their performance.